? AGAIN Child Sacrifice

[ECOLING at aol.com]

[The original message was posted on the Nahua-l list,
and then later on the AZTLAN list.
This is the same reply, posted also to each list.

Mr. Haly has responded that his course is an
upper-division course intended to teach critical thinking.
That removes one of the most serious problems.

But Mr. Haly's response mis-estimates my reasons,
which are NOT political correctness,
NOT an aversion to the topic, and
NOT based on cultural relativism
They are simply based on observation of what happens
when this issue is sensationalized, as it almost always
is in the media.

The questions Mr. Haly asked have
been asked before on several lists, and there are many
files which can be searched there.  We should not have
to go through this yet again.

The way in which the qustion was initially posed was
very open-ended.  It did not suggest anything about
a more sophisticated critical-thinking approach to this.
If Mr. Haly does have a new approach which uses
more critical thinking and is less vulnerable to being
sensationalized, it would be a great boon to all of us
to have it available.  I have my doubts, based simply on the
extreme power of the sensationalizing enterprise,
but that is simply a bad taste left over from past experience.
Someone MAY come up with a new way of handling this
issue.

There are indeed many peoples who believe the media
treatment of their ancient ancestors is just one more way of denying them
respect as normal human beings, that it damages their interests.]

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics